Town­ship tri­umph

The Gumedes have made Soweto their new home in sea­son 2 of Gold Dig­gers.

The sec­ond sea­son of Gold Dig­gers (2015- cur­rent) is shot on lo­ca­tion in Or­lando East, Soweto but not on a tra­di­tional set – the se­ries is filmed in a real house that’s been cus­tom­fit­ted for film­ing. While the owner had to va­cate the premises when the crew moved in, the up­grades that’ve been made have been worth the trou­ble. Gold Dig­gers art direc­tor An­neri Ger­icke trans­formed the house from floor to ceil­ing, in­clud­ing build­ing new rooms. “Ren­o­va­tions took three weeks to com­plete and didn’t cost more than R20 000,” ex­plains An­neri. And in line with not break­ing the bank, the crew also brought in pieces from their own homes that they no longer needed or sold them to the pro­duc­tion com­pany. NB! See more on p23. May (Tina Jaxa – left) and Ruth (Cle­men­tine Mosi­mane) have moved up in the world from a ru­ral home to a shared house in Soweto, Joburg. “We com­pletely changed the house,” says art direc­tor An­neri Ger­icke. “We built two ex­tra rooms, paved the yard and re­painted the house.” The home owner gets to ben­e­fit from the up­grade, but An­neri adds that she tried to keep the dé­cor theme by mak­ing the ex­tra new rooms as sim­i­lar to the orig­i­nal set­ting as pos­si­ble. “We had to build a proper build­ing, not just a movie build­ing, be­cause some­one’s go­ing to live here when we’re done film­ing and we don’t want the roof to fall down on them.” Pa­trick’s (Mbon­geni Ngema) walk­ing canes are a mem­ory of the late hus­band that Ruth shared with May and are a sub­tle re­minder of the de­ceased char­ac­ter.